Three Flames

Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams) portrays a Cambodian family’s conflicts with precision in this affecting novel told from the perspectives of six characters. In 2012, Ryna, a mother who has struggled with her father’s death during the Khmer Rouge regime, feels her hesitant impulse for revenge crumble after seeing her father’s now elderly murderer 33 years later. Ryna and her husband Pich’s middle daughter, Nita, has her dreams of finishing school scuttled by her father’s insistence she marry wealthy, inattentive Mr. Noth. In a moving story, Kamal, Ryna and Pich’s only son, attempts to talk to his crush Sophea despite rumors she is a prostitute. The oldest daughter, Thida, moves to Phnom Penh to work in a garment factory to support her family after several bad harvests but is taken to a brothel by a cousin, who claims her father sold her. Lightman avoids voyeuristic exploitation in the ensuing tragedies. A bicycle-stealing, teenaged Pich, dodging conscription in 1973, is visited by his grandmother’s ghost before his scheme collapses. The youngest daughter, pensive Sreypov, finally cracks through her father’s authoritarian rule by marshalling family support for her refusal of an arranged marriage. Lightman infuses Cambodian culture naturally among his considered dissections of pain. Readers will be moved by this collection’s navigation of deeply personal heartaches and lingering implications of war. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman-Schneider Literary Agents. (Sept.)